Core Post 3 - Sabrina

 

One of the reasons I identify as non-binary is feeling alienated from feminine spaces. So these readings about the construction of femininity through a post-feminist lens were a fun time for me to think about in terms of what notions of the feminine are being created there. I absolutely want to acknowledge that I don’t think conversations around feminism and women have to include discussions of non-binary genders, and I don’t want to hijack a feminine space, but a lot of the discussions around post-feminism and different feminism in these essays felt intertwined with non-binary gender identification in the discussion of new forms of feminism or gender springing from a negative reaction to previous thoughts on femininity.

 

Speaking solely from my perspective, the process of discovering my gender identity began with being in female spaces, feeling too queer or too other for these spaces, and then seek genderqueer spaces that allow for different forms of inclusion and expression. In looking at these readings, I’m curious if looking at these spaces of heteronormative femininity that baffle me can generally be understood through these readings on post-feminism.

 

I most easily understood post-feminism as explained in Jess Butler’s essay. She talks about postfeminism as being rooted in the body and sexual difference, and outlines feminism as a commodity:

“As liberated consumers, contemporary young women self-consciously participate in a highly stylized “postfeminist masquerade” as a statement of personal choice (McRobbie 2009, 64). These women buy skinny jeans as a marker of their “progressive” gender ideals; they get pedicures and bikini waxes because they have the freedom to “choose” to engage in conven- tional femininity. The consumer-based logic of postfeminism conflates feminism and femininity, individualism and liberation, and consumption and activism to the extent that “women apparently choose to be seen as sexual objects because it suits their liberated interests” (Goldman, Heath, and Smith 1991, 338). Unchained from political activ- ism, postfeminism constructs gender as a consumer product that women can try on—and take off—as they choose.” (13)

Looking at that idea of taking it off and on, I just always want it off. And it’s not the entirety of femininity that I feel foreign from, though to have people acknowledge my non-binary identity I often push back against the feminine more than I actually feel matches the amount I wish to engage with the feminine in my self-identificaiton.

 

There was also some hints at this oppositional reaction to expectations of femininity in the McRobbie:

“Why do young women recoil in horror at the very idea of the feminist? To count as a girl today appears to require this kind of ritualistic denunciation, which in turn suggests that one strategy in the disempowering of feminism includes it being histori- cised and generationalised and thus easily rendered out of date.” (5)

“Thus the new female subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom. There is quietude and complicity in the manners of generationally specific notions of cool, and more precisely an uncritical relation to dominant commercially produced sexual represen- tations which actively invoke hostility to assumed feminist positions from the past in order to endorse a new regime of sexual meanings based on female consent, equality, participation and pleasure, free of politics.” (7)

I’m overemphasizing the bits that explain why people don’t want to or don’t like to identify as a girl, but it seems like what this reading suggests makes people move away from feminism towards post-feminism is what makes me begin identifying as non-binary rather than as woman.

 

Basically, I feel like within these readings on different forms of feminism and different (negative) responses from one branch of feminism to another, I feel like there’s this reaction of femininity is confusing and I don’t understand it and don’t see the value in learning to engage with it when presented with the option to just not unpack all that. Then occupying this outside perspective it’s easier to see the ways in which gender gets tied up into, well, everything, and from there feel even more comfortable not wanting to engage there, or wanting to engage with a third option.